Raoul Wallenberg, born on August 4th, 1912 in Sweden, a hero who saved tens of thousand of Jews in WWII, has been nearly forgotten but you can remember him this day with a good film that he himself liked.
When Hitler began rounding up the Jews in Hungary in 1944, Wallenberg faced down the Nazi death machine with nothing more than courage and paper, partly by mass manufacturing fake Swedish passports and partly by threatening Nazi authorities that he had accumulated sufficient evidence to prosecute them as war criminals in the event that the Axis powers lost.
Unfortunately, when the war ended the Soviets arrested him for reasons unknown, locked him away in the brutal Soviet prison system and repeatedly resisted appeals to release him. (The Russians now say that he probably died in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison a decade after the war, but no one knows for sure. As late as 1987 he was sighted in a Soviet prison by two independent witnesses.)
There are two biopics that tell his story, but neither do him justice. A better choice would be the Leslie Howard film Pimpernel Smith, about a British professor of classics who secretly rescues Nazi prisoners. Why? Raoul Wallenberg is said to have been inspired by this film, which was among the first to depict Nazi labor camps. It can generally be found free online.